Fairchild Semiconductor And The Men Who Helped Invent 'Silicon' Valley

The new American Experience documentary 'Silicon Valley' looks at the 'Traitorous Eight,' who left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor and give birth to today's Silicon Valley. From left to right: Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last.

Think Silicon Valley and chances are the companies that come to mind are Apple, Google, and Facebook.

And that’s what makes "Silicon Valley,” a new 90-minute American Experience documentary that airs on PBS Feb. 5, so unusual.

Instead of focusing on today’s tech giants, the filmmakers decided to look back to 1956 when tech innovation centered on silicon – as in the material used to invent the microprocessor.

At the center of the action was physicist and engineer Robert Noyce, one of the “Traitorous 8” men who left Shockley Semiconductor to start up their own transistor company, Fairchild Semiconductor. (The eight include Noyce, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, and Sheldon Roberts.)

Noyce, then 29, became their leader, setting the stage for the startup mentality that has reigned in Silicon Valley since. After overseeing Fairchild, where he helped bring the microprocessor to market, Noyce and fellow Shockley traitor Gordon Moore went on to start Intel Corp., one of many companies that were spawned out of Fairchild.

“The goal was to look at the early years of Silicon Valley as a destination, a place and an idea,” Randall MacLowry, who directed and edited the documentary, said in an interview. “There’s a lack of understanding or knowledge of how it came about. Our goal was to talk about the driving forces that enabled Silicon Valley to grow.”

The majority of the story centers on Noyce and the events leading up to the founding of Fairchild. As the documentary unfolds, we learn of the frustrations and limitations the eight felt under William Shockley, who invented the transistor and won a Nobel Prize for his work.

At Fairchild, Noyce and his compatriots adopted the egalitarian culture that has become part of the Silicon Valley way of doing things. There was also the drinking at local waterholes like Walker’s Wagon Wheel, which was frequented by both the men working on tech and the women who were hired to assemble the chips because they were thought to be more adept at doing the careful handwork required, MacLowry says.

“In the mid to late 50s, the preponderance of companies were much more hierarchical. Someone like Bob Noyce chaffed against that structure and decided to a build a company that was more open and rewarded contributions,” MacLowry says. “We were trying to capture a flavor of the more playful side of the environment there. People worked really hard and played really hard."

The filmmakers were able to speak with some of those silicon pioneers, including Moore, Last and Andy Grove, a Fairchild engineer who went on to serve as Intel’s CEO after Noyce and Grove. Venture capitalist Arthur Rock, who helped the Traitorous Eight find the funding to form Fairchild, shows off the handwritten list of companies that declined to fund them.

“It’s a small story about Silicon Valley. It’s a bigger story that embodies the American dream,” says MacLowry. “It’s about reinvention. It’s about taking risks and looking to find new opportunities...Silicon Valley is synonymous with that idea of a new notion of the American dream.”

I've spent almost my entire career as a journalist covering tech in and around Silicon Valley, meeting entrepreneurs, executives and engineers, watching companies rise and fall (or in the case of Apple, rise, fall and rise again) and attending confabs and conferences. Before...